Fus Ro Dah!

crawford — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:48:20 +0000

So I finally started playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim yesterday and it rocks! I was going to pre-order it, but I didn’t think I would have time to play it while finishing up the house. I finally picked it up on a Steam during their Christmas sale. It’s an absolute gorgeous game and so far game play seems very fluid. There was something that Oblivion, although another great game, was missing and I think Skyrim is filling that gap. I’m just level 4 and have just gotten to fight my first dragon.

Home Server Rebuild

crawford — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 05:33:23 +0000

I recently decided it was time to upgrade the software on my home server. I had been using Ubuntu 7.10 server (command line only) to run MythTV as a backend and as a file server. For nearly a year and a half I have not used MythTV mainly because most of the shows I watched were available online and then I started having problems with the web frontend to schedule recordings which basically made it useless. I also wanted to do more with my server, but ran into some issues with not having a GUI or not using a newer release of Ubuntu.

The process should be simple – backup data, install Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), setup software.

The first main hurdle I had was with my RAID setup. My configuration consists of four hard drives – one as system OS and boot, the other three in a RAID 0 setup. I was hoping that my RAID setup would remain intact, but I wasn’t taking any chances and decided to backup the RAID drives. Surprisingly, the RAID configuration was saved and that was one less thing I had to restore.

Now, I was ready to install the new OS. All seemed well, booted into the live CD, selected my options, and error. For some reason the OS was saying that the main hard drive was in a RAID configuration, but with only one hard drive it couldn’t install. Fearing that I had accidentally chosen one of the hard drives on the RAID side, I unplugged all those drives and tried again with no luck. After about an hour of searching Google I finally figured out what was going on. Seems that when I first setup my server way back when, RAID meta data was installed on the drive. Not sure how that happened, but nevertheless there was a simple fix and Ubuntu 10.04 finally started installing.

With a fresh install of Ubuntu and a nice GUI desktop, I got to work installing drivers for my RAID card and getting my file server going. That turned out to be easier than I had thought especially since my RAID configuration was still intact with all my files there. And of course with any Linux install, I had to install Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Very simple task. Then I installed Subversion which is a versioning control application for my coding projects.

The next step was to install my media server software, TwonkyServer. Grabbed the latest release and was up and running in no time. Even better was the new version fixed a few problems I was having with their old version. Now I was on a roll so I decided to get a GMail backup process going so I could make sure to have an archive of all my email. Found a very helpful walk through of how to use getmail to accomplish such a feat.

I’m very happy that I decided to upgrade my server. I can now to a lot more with my home media server.

Blog Reboot

crawford — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:07:24 +0000

Thought I would try the blog thing again. I tried doing this a couple of years ago, but didn’t have time to setup the CMS the way I wanted. I decided to switch from Drupal to WordPress which is more of a blogging tool. So far so good. Installation was easy and even installed a couple of plugins with little trouble that would have taken hours or more in Drupal. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Drupal is a powerful CMS and has its place, I just don’t have the time to devote to it for a simple blog.

May this be the first of many blog posts!

Matthew Crawford

Fus Ro Dah!

Home Server Rebuild

Blog Reboot